Families need £36,800 to live acceptably, study says

michaels

And actually at those sort of income levels effective marginal tax rate is 72% so redcing family income by 10k will only reduce net by 2800 or about the same as the net cost of the child care after tax credits on that.

ukcarper wrote: »

The median full time male wage is £28.4k which as I said is £800 less that the £36.8k figure less childcare costs so they wouldn’t need to earn £36.8k.

£800 a year is £15 a week which you could easily earn with out the need for child care.

chewmylegoff

pqrdef wrote: »

What's wrong with that? Where's the logic in supposing that other people can have an acceptable standard of living on less money than you would need yourself?

If you ask the second question, you won't get a sensible answer to it. What you'll get is some version of "Frankly I couldn't give a toss whether benefit claimants have an acceptable standard of living or not"

Because the purpose of benefits isn't to provide middle class families who have time to waste on focus groups with whatever they consider a comfortable existence to be. It is to make sure people have the most basic needs attended to, such that they don't end up living in a tent in the park.

patchwork_cat

Who on earth did they ask? They have 4p a week for DIY and nearly £10 a week for house maintenance! They have 8p a week for toys and buy a toybox, but what are these poor kids putting in the toybox!

I know the shocking statistic of number of childen without books, but their is nothing for books! If their library is anything like ours they will buy books.

£30 a week on going out and no books, shocking.

Zekko

They've got everything else on there, but they missed off Pension Contributions. :money:

The £685/week figure quoted on http://mis.jrf.org.uk/ would surely be income required after tax deductions (in order to make those purchases).

The actual salary figure would therefore be around £50k/year gross. This shows you how ludicrous the numbers are.

simongregson

the_flying_pig wrote: »

even given the impossibility of defining life within "social norms", an increase of one third reveals what a load of, erm, crap this must be.

GDP's lower than 2008, right? so i can only think that average household income is also lower.

I suspect that the difference in required earnings is the reduction in tax credits that recently was introduced, this affect the effective child care costs as well as the family income, so a larger income from work would be required to achieve the standard of living specified.

If nothing else the survey shows why there is such a drastic loss of discretionary spending in the economy as in 2008 presumably the family would have spent some of the spare money rather than saved it. The JRF AFAIK have always surveyed the cost of 'participating fully in society' so don't claim it is a breadline figure.

sjaypink

Hmm, if you look at the breakdown it is asking for ridicule (& I thanked several of the 1st page posts accordingly), but thinking about it personally, my household has only a slightly less gross income, & we feel pretty much below 'minimum standard' :cool:
Makes you think how many of us actually know how much net household income we have (admitted tho, if you're single this is simple) & of that how much we spend on average on this 'stuff', (ignoring that it is a very idealistic survey, as ever from JRF) it is interesting to reflect.

ETA: Looking at the table at the bottom, how can you have "104% of income" .... ? :-/

patchwork_cat

Zekko wrote: »

They've got everything else on there, but they missed off Pension Contributions. :money:

The £685/week figure quoted on http://mis.jrf.org.uk/ would surely be income required after tax deductions (in order to make those purchases).

The actual salary figure would therefore be around £50k/year gross. This shows you how ludicrous the numbers are.

This is a very good point, not so much the pension contribution aspect, but this £36800 is TAKE HOME PAY. Certainly my inference was it was gross and it isn't - as you say it would equal in teh order of upper £45K+.

This makes the whole thing a mockery as I am sure that a damn site more families than 1 in 4 live on less take home.